SEO Trends 2022

Featured Snippets To Become More Important

In at number 1, Featured Snippets appear at the top of the search engines – it’s usually a box with images and a short section of text. This is here to provide the searcher with a brief snippet of information (the clues in the name) and speed the searching up. If Google has done its homework, it should be exactly what you’re looking for.

This is why the Featured Snippets on Google gain so much traffic through them, pushing companies above their competitors meaning they’re very lucrative indeed. Being on Page 1 is what all business owners and marketing managers want to achieve to grow their businesses.

The Featured Snippets information is often made up of a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ), Question and Answer (Q&A) or how-to guide with bullet points of how to achieve any given task step by step.

These Structured Snippets are rich snippets, meaning they often also include images, review stars, product pricing and such like.

To achieve a snippet such as this, marketing managers should structure their content around the questions their target audience is asking and the answer to fulfill those. Google provides two sections on Google Search which can help you find ideas for questions, they include: “Searches Related To” + “People Also Ask”.

Video To Support SEO Strategy

So let’s get one thing out the way straight away. Video is MASSIVE.

At the moment, YouTube has more than 1 billion, yes billion online users. The users of that website behave much like they do on Google. So wait… yes, exactly. Marketing Managers are busy optimising their website for certain keywords hoping to gain traffic while at the same time, those searchers are also looking for the answers in video form over on YouTube.

Ok, so I know I should be creating content for YouTube but how does this relate to SEO?

Google wants to provide the best experience possible on Google Search. The best content, most informative content wins. How does Google judge that? I’m glad you asked.

Google judges bounce rate and time on page. Therefore, if you’re providing valuable video content you’re more likely to be keeping your audience on your website for longer.

In addition to this, when you do upload your videos to YouTube, you really should be optimising the titles, descriptions and tags with high search volume, relevant keywords that your audience is searching for.

Google Discover - Predictive Search

To help explain this 2021 SEO trend, lets first talk about Google Discover.

What is Google Discover? (We hear you ask)

Google Discover appears on Google’s mobile homepage on the web browser and on it’s applications and it’s essentially a feed of content. This feed populates with content based on the search history of the user – pushing content which is based on interest and topics they search about.

This is driven by Google’s Artificial Intelligence tools and it discovers behavioural patterns over time and begins to learn what it’s users want to see and read about. The AI technology tries to become more accurate over time to pull through content that the users would like to see.

Google hasn’t released any specific information as to how SEO Managers are able to appear in this content feed. However, the usual advice is given, quality content, strong backlink portfolio and a technical sound website will help to improve your chances of being included.

Search By Voice

Voice technology has been expanding rapidly over the last few years. Most will be familiar with the likes of Apple’s Siri however of course there are many others such as Google Assistant and Alexa by Amazon. These can be found on mobile and tablet devices as well as smart speakers for the home.

Marketing Managers see the benefit of appearing in these voice search results but how do companies appear? People tend to search in a different way when speaking than when typing. Try to optimise for keywords which are more said than written. Spoken questions tend to be longer and longer phased.

For example:

“Where is the closest McDonalds to West Bridgford?” a person may ask Siri.

Whereas they are more likely to type “McDonalds in Nottingham” on Google Search or Google Maps.

Mobile Friendly Websites

Google has been heavily focused on improving the users experience on mobile devices for a while now. Google rolled out mobile-first indexing back in 2019 – which essentially means that Google sees the most important version of your website is the mobile one.

Website managers need to ensure that their website is mobile friendly. They can do this by using a handy tool that Google has provided here: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

In addition to this tool, if your website is setup within Google Search Console (and it definitely should be) you should navigate to the section labelled “mobile usability” and check out the report in there.

Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is a technical job. It requires ensuring that pages are able to be easily crawled by Google’s robots. If you require support with making your website mobile friendly, get in touch with the team at Visibility here.

Semantically Related Keywords

In earlier days, digital marketing professionals would focus purely on a couple of main keywords per page. This naturally limited the range of keywords that would be included. Google wants to see a more genuine way of writing content, with the main aim being to answer the query to its fullest extent. Rather than only including heading which have high search volume, think logically about the question and answer all possible sub-questions to the best of your ability. Remember the content is not for Google’s robots, it’s written for your target audience – so naturally if they are able to read it easier, they’ll read it all – leading them to stay on the page longer – which of course is good for your SEO rankings efforts.

Understanding The Data

To have the most competitive website you can possibly have, you should become more analytical thinking. By understanding which pages are performing and which aren’t based on the data available will help to fix any website issues and improve user experience and your relationship with Google’s robots.

Consider looking the following:

• Buyers Behaviour – How are people purchasing from you, where have they come from and how did they behave on your website prior to the purchase.
• Test Visuals – Do pages which images and video perform better? Check your data, and if so, you know which types of content are doing best.
• Webpage Loading Time – Are your pages loading quick enough? If not, you could be losing a lot of profitable traffic.
• Response Errors – Are there any pages which your users cannot access? This needs to be fixed for obvious reasons.

Bounce Rates – Are there huge bounce rates on content which gains a lot of traffic? If so, by improving the content and the page experience you’re likely to be able to increase leads and sales.

Optimise Your Website Images

The development of searching by photo has developed hugely. On popular platform WeChat, users are able to submit a photo of anything and search online for that. Google wants SEO Managers to correctly label photos which will support their longer term roll out of such technologies. Google’s Robots currently crawl the Alt text of the images to be able to understand what the image is displaying so optimise your images to Google’s robots now and for the future of image search.

Comprehensive Content - Long-Form

Google wants to show the best results to its users. The best content usually answers the users queries fully, so it’s no wonder that long content does so well on Google. Writing 3,000 words or more is going to naturally provide the user with much more information than an article of only 800 – 1300 words.

We recommend to all of our clients to write content for your audiences, provide examples and cover all bases. Your audience will see that you’ve worked hard to provide the best answer possibly and of course we hope that leads to more sales and enquiries.

So how do content writers do this in practise? They tend to map out the content before going ahead and writing. They have their main title which will nicely summarise what the piece of content will cover and underneath headers which break the content into chunks. These headers should answer sub-questions that are asked around the main topic.

Local Business, Local Marketing

Year after year, Local SEO is a hot topic. Google has been constantly improving local search over the years, making sure the user is getting the best local information for where they are based. Searchers looking for petrol, food or coffee as well as local services like plumbers ect are usually looking for a product or service to be in their vicinity. There’s no point Google pointing their users to coffee shops in London if you’re in the centre of Nottingham town centre.

If you’re a local business and you’re looking for customers in your local area, getting your local SEO right is crucial. Google supports businesses very well with this, including the Google My Business free listing, which really is a must have!

Local link building and building authority in your local area help the search engines to understand where you’re based, and be sure to target local keywords on your service pages too.

Google E.A.T

The search engines want to see quality content, so to succeed SEO’s should be following best practise. Quality has been qualified by the Google EAT principle which includes the following:

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

Companies need to ensure they are demonstrating these to Google to stand a chance of ranking well in the search engines.

Discover how you can utilise SEO to grow your business online

The team here at Visibility are experts in all areas of digital marketing. If you’re looking to learn more about how your website can benefit from Organic Search (SEO) services, then a superb first step would be to request your free website marketing review and one of the team will put together a review of your website.

Click here for your free website marketing review.